ASUS external graphics card station for laptops

ASUS had a number of interesting products to show but the one
that really caught our eye was the XG Station - an
external graphics card case for laptop users!

The easy bit is install a PCIe graphics card inside but what's
needed is a compatible notebook for the XG to connect to
- one equipped with a new ExpressCard slot.

That slot hooks
up to the notebook's core logic via a PCIe x1 conduit. The graphics
card within the XG is then connected to an external monitor and away
you
go. One thing we're not sure about is quite how much
the comparatively low-bandwidth interconnect
saps performance.

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ASUS was showing a sample equipped with one of its
own NVIDIA GeForce 7900
GS cards - the
fastest currently approved. The Station's LED screen can highlight,
among other things, current GPU speed and gaming FPS. Turning the knob
allows you to overclock the GPU, too. The sample we saw, though, was
running pretty darn hot, so we reckon that ASUS may
need to beef up the cooling
for the box.

Above you can see the card's left-hand graphics output is
being fed out to a monitor (white plug).

The XG also features a USB2.0
hub and Dolby
Headphone Technology that creates pseudo 5.1-channel sound when any
pair of headphones is connected.

At first, ASUS will only be selling the XG Station in a bundle that
includes its own GeForce 7900GS graphics card. We don't know the price
as yet but do expect to see the package in the channel in Q2 this year.

If it can transfer the data fast enough through express card slots then this is a perfect solution for people who love thier laptops and dont want to replace everything jsut for the sake of dx10 although one thing is whether itll have the room for a full length dx10 card like the 8800 because if i remember correctly that is almost 30cm long! :surprised: